The Not-So-Invisible Empire

Imagine a political movement created in a moment of terrible anxiety, its origins shrouded in a peculiar combination of manipulation and grass-roots mobilization, its ranks dominated by Christian conservatives and self-proclaimed patriots, its agenda driven by its members’ fervent embrace of nationalism, nativism and moral regeneration, with more than a whiff of racism wafting through it.

No, not that movement. The one from the 1920s, with the sheets and the flaming crosses and the ludicrous name meant to evoke a heroic past. The Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, they called it. And for a few years it burned across the nation, a fearsome thing to ­behold.

In “One Hundred Percent American,” Thomas R. Pegram, a professor of history at Loyola University Maryland, traces the Invisible Empire’s meteoric rise and equally precipitous fall. The ’20s Klan was born, he explains — or more precisely was reborn — on Thanksgiving evening 1915, when 16 Southerners trooped up Stone Mountain, in Georgia, for a bit of ritual bunkum inspired by D. W. Griffith’s incendiary film “The Birth of a Nation.” The group’s leader, a one-time Methodist minister named William Simmons, hoped to turn the men into a fraternal organization that night: sort of a Rotary for white supremacists. But he had no idea how to do it. So for five years the Klan stagnated, until Simmons handed the operation over to a couple of publicity agents, Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke, who knew a thing or two about the dark art of marketing.

Tyler and Clarke kept the costumes and crosses and secret signs that Simmons loved. But they broadened his bigotry. No longer would it be enough to target African-Americans, not when there were Catholics, Jews and immigrants to hate as well. They also added an aggressive political pitch, seizing on the hyperpatriotism of the recently concluded World War to turn the Klan into the champion of “one hundred percent Americanism,” staunch defender of law, order and traditional values. It was a brilliant appeal, tapping as it did into long-running prejudices, the war’s overwrought rhetoric and fears of a changing America. In the early 1920s, the K.K.K. became a national phenomenon, more popular north of the Mason-Dixon line than south of it. At its peak in 1924 there were probably 35,000 Klansmen in Detroit, about 55,000 in Chicago, 200,000 in Ohio, 240,000 in Indiana and 260,000 in Pennsylvania: a veritable army of proud Anglo-Saxons kluxing in their local klaverns. Ten bucks a head for membership, another six and a half for those fine flowing robes.

Klan leaders used that stunning success to insinuate the Invisible Empire into public life. On the local level, Klansmen turned themselves into moral watchdogs: beating drunken husbands, whipping wayward wives, chasing down bootleggers and purifying public schools, mostly by demanding that Catholic teachers be fired. In Indiana, Oregon, Colorado, Texas and Arkansas they built political machines strong enough to put their hand-picked candidates into governors’ offices. Indiana’s K.K.K. took control of the State Legislature, too, while Texas sent a Klansman to the United States Senate. There was even talk in the highest circles of trying to elect a Kluxer president.

Then everything came apart. The immediate cause was a sex scandal that swept through the Klan in the early months of 1925. But the K.K.K. was already collapsing, Pegram says, its rank and file pulling away from its leaders’ oversize ambitions. Drawing on a range of local studies, he argues that most Klansmen didn’t want anything more than a bit of fraternal intolerance — the chance to bond with their Protestant brethren, wear flashy outfits and complain about the country’s going to hell — just as Simmons had thought. They had no interest in whipping anyone; that was the work of the Klan’s bully boys, the militant minority who in another setting would have been wearing brown shirts. Many klaverns ignored their leaders’ political directives. Others splintered into rival factions. And almost everywhere, knights complained that the central office was more interested in making money than in saving America.

Pegram is at his best exploring the problems that bedeviled the Klan. He’s not a supple writer. But he’s got an eye for the telling detail: the organizer who mistakenly wandered into a meeting of the Knights of Columbus and came away convinced that Catholics weren’t the threat the K.K.K. claimed them to be; the Ohio klavern that bombed its own headquarters so it would appear to be under assault; the Texas Klansman who left a grim meeting in 1925 so disgusted with the order’s incompetence he put his robes down by the side of the road and set them on fire. He wasn’t alone. In the late 1920s Klan membership tumbled, klaverns closed and the Invisible Empire settled into the dustbin of history, Pegram says, while the pluralism it had railed against marched inexorably onward.

That’s not the way Kelly J. Baker sees it. In form, her book, “Gospel According to the Klan,” is far narrower than Pegram’s, in execution much weaker. A religious studies professor at the University of Tennessee, Baker concentrates not on the Klan’s institutional dynamics but on its embrace of militant Protestantism, which she argues shaped Klansmen’s understanding of their world and the threats it faced. That’s hardly a revelation; this was an organization that spent a lot of time setting crosses on fire, after all. But Baker works it as hard as she can. While Pegram builds his book up from the experiences of ordinary Klansmen, she builds out from the Klan’s official declarations of religious devotion drawn from K.K.K. newspapers and magazines. In large part, “Gospel According to the Klan” is an exegesis of these less-than-sacred texts, a painstaking analysis of the banal. The results are less than spectacular. Having walked us through a series of Kluxer tributes to their mothers, for instance, Baker tells us that “the Klan’s vision of motherhood revolved around the female figure, who sustained the order and fostered her children regardless of her own interests.”

At the end of the book, though, Baker steps back from her texts. Suddenly her analysis becomes more pointed. Yes, the Klan had a very short life. But it has to be understood, she contends, as of a piece with other moments of fevered religious nationalism, from the anti-Catholic riots of the antebellum era to modern anti-­Islam bigots. Indeed, earlier this year, Herman Cain declared that he wouldn’t be comfortable with a Muslim in his cabinet. It’s tempting to see those moments as Pegram does the Klan: desperate, even pitiful attempts to stop the inevitable broadening of American society. But Baker seems closer to the mark when she says that there’s a dark strain of bigotry and exclusion running through the national experience. Sometimes it seems to weaken. And sometimes it spreads, as anyone who reads today’s papers knows, fed by our fears and our hatreds.

ONE HUNDRED PERCENT AMERICAN

The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s

By Thomas R. Pegram

280 pp. Ivan R. Dee. $27.95

GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE KLAN

The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930

By Kelly J. Baker

Illustrated. 326 pp. University Press of Kansas. $34.95

Kevin Boyle teaches history at Ohio State University. He is the author of “Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age.”

A version of this review appears in print on November 27, 2011, on page BR34 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Not-So-Invisible Empire. Today's Paper|Subscribe